Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry (and Everything Else), but Were Afraid to Ask.

December 03, 2008

Satan's Scourge published!

The mammoth manuscript that I
began thirty-five years ago, in 1974,

Satan’s Scourge,

A Narrative of the Age of
Witchcraft

in England and New England
1580-1697

by Lewis Putnam Turco

was finally published today, May 2nd, 2009. A number of people have ordered copies, which have been mailed, and many others have asked for details; here they are, together with the Foreword and Acknowledgments:

Satan’s
scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England
1580-1697 is a book of history, a chronicle of the period when the Age of
Sympathetic Magic, which had been the system by which mankind operated from
time immemorial, was beginning to shift over to the Age of Science, “The New
Philosophy,” by which the world would be increasingly governed from then forward.
The main focus of the book is upon the Putnam family of Buckinghamshire, in
England, from the birth of John Putnam, born in 1580, some of whose descendants
would be deeply involved in the last gasp of sympathetic magic, the great witchcraft
explosion of Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692, which is the climax of the
book.

The volume
not only looks at all the witchcraft cases in England and New England
during the period covered, but it also tells the stories of the major scientists
and Adepts of sympathetic magic (often the two were the same) in Europe and
America. The effect is twofold: First, the method is strictly chronological,
unfolding like a tapestry year by year. As one thread of the tapestry swells
and tapers off, others appear and interweave with one another. Second, the
history is told from the point of view of common people, the Puritans of
England and New England primarily, but also the crystal gazers, alchemists,
alleged witches and their accusers, and those ordinary citizens caught up in
the webs woven by plotters, liars, “possessed” children and their parents, and,
of course, the clerics.

Furthermore,
this is the period when America was settled, when Oliver Cromwell and the
Roundheads carried out their Puritan revolution, and all the politics and
machinations of the relevant sovereigns and courtiers of the period are also a
part of the tapestry here woven.

One is
probably saying to oneself at this point, “It’s too complicated and confusing.”
But when one begins to read the book one discovers that things start out clear,
and they stay clear throughout. Everything in it is true. All the incidents
took place in the real world, according to my historical sources (which are
exhaustive — A bibliography is appended), and this depiction of the Salem witchcraft
trials is the most complete and accurate that has ever been written, many errors
and misprisions having been corrected.

I wish to
acknowledge those who have helped and inspired me in this project. The first person
to encourage my writing on the subject was Dr. Eleanor Michel of Meriden,
Connecticut, High School for whose 11th grade English class in
1950-51 I wrote an addendum — an extra concluding chapter, a postscript — to The
House of the Seven Gables, in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne [http://www.nightsandweekends.com/articles/09/NW0900132.php].

At about the
same time four of us at Meriden High founded the Fantaseers Science-Fiction
Reading Club which grew to include (Rev.) Ben Barnes, Pierre Bennerup, Bill
Burns, (Prof.) Lindsey Churchill, the late Phineas Gay, (Rev.) George Hangen,
George Lallos, the late Jack Rule, (Rev.) Ray Staszewski, George Veillette,
(Rev.) Arthur von Au, and Paul Wiese — the Black Thirteen who provided me with
Faustian fellowship, evil escapades, vile volumes, and the opprobrious
opportunity to do my second (very imaginative) writing on the subject of the
Salem Village witchcrafts: A Senior Day skit, a photograph of which appears on
page 139 of my book Fantaseers, A Book of Memories, published
in 2005 [also by Star Cloud Press].

Next, I beg the
indulgence of the Research Foundation of State University of New York for
providing me with a Faculty Fellowship during the summer of 1974, under which I
was to write a volume of poetry but, inasmuch as I had begun this book in the
spring, I finished the first draft instead. I did nothing with it thereafter
beyond query a few publishers who seemed not much interested in it because of
its length, so I put it away until the spring of 2006 when I rewrote it as I
typed it into my new MacBook Pro computer.

I wish to
express my deep gratitude to several librarians for their help in my research:
Eleanor S. Adams of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts,
for her early and kind assistance; Dorothy Mozley, Genealogy and Local History
Librarian of the Springfield City Library, Springfield, Massachusetts, for her
help with the Springfield witchcraft cases of 1646 and 1651, and Cecilia
Caneschi, Reference Librarian of the Meriden, Connecticut, Public Library for
her great help with the Benham Wallingford witchcraft cases of 1691, 1692, and
1697.

The
description of the Vale of Aylesbury at the beginning of this book is in fact
very largely that of Eben Putnam, not myself, taken from his Putnam genealogies
(see Bibliography). Inasmuch as he explored the area, and I have not, I thought
it as well to leave his descriptions largely as he wrote them. I thought it
fitting, too, that this scholar of the Putnam family, who spent such enormous
amounts of time and work researching his people, thus making the Putnams one of
the most thoroughly documented families in America, ought to leave his imprint
on these pages in some way other than statistically, for his two genealogies
were published in limited editions (though I have made them available from
University Microfilms International of Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Over the
years I have met or known many people who are descended from the folk depicted
here including my dear friend, the late poet Constance Carrier of New Britain,
Connecticut; Curtis Disbrow, the husband of my sister-in-law Anne Disbrow of
Meriden; my cousin-in-law Gary Getchell of Cedar Grove, Maine; Lindsey
Churchill and the late Jack Rule, both Fantaseers; the Maine artist Margaret
Macy, a descendant of Rebecca Nurse; the Cleveland poet Mary Oliver; the late
novelist John Cheever, who angrily informed me in my living room in Oswego, New
York, that the character Ezekiel Cheever of Salem Village was fictional, having
been invented by Arthur Miller for his play The Crucible — John did
not stop fuminguntil I showed him his forebear’s testimony in the Salem Witchraft
trial records; my correspondent of almost forty years, the great fantasist Ray
Bradbury, and there were two Drs. Mather, father and son (but doctors of
medicine, not divinity — both Roman catholics!) in Oswego where I lived and
taught for thirty-one years at the State University of New York College at
Oswego, and where I wrote the first draft of this volume.

I wish to express my
deepest gratitude to my wife, Jean, who helped me with the chore of working on
the index of this book, the most grueling task she has suffered since the
school year 1968-1969 when she carried most of the physical labor of typing and
editing two manuscripts, The Spiritual Autobiography of Luigi Turco, my father, and The
Literature of New York: A Selective Bibliography of Colonial and Native New
York State Authors.

Lewis Putnam
Turco

Dresden
Mills, Maine

Tuesday,
December 2nd, 2008

REMARKS

Camden, Maine

March 31, 2009

To: Lewis
Turco

Dear Sir:

I have to
admit enjoying your lecture of Sunday, March 29, in double time (military term)
because of its double concentration on witchcraft and Reverend George
Burroughs. Then seeing your volume, Satan's Scourge, on
the front table I realized you may have written the most comprehensive modern
treatment of the epic yet. And I suppose you have.

But prime
purpose of this letter is to say I have begun to read your tome and greatly
thank you for the labors you invested in it.

Sincerely,

Robert Manns

Playwright

Libby, Montana

Putnam Turco
—

I just
received Satan's Scourge, and what an enormous work it is.
I've only had time to flip through it but already love an incident with two
guys, a clay pipe and a horse's ass. 725 pages and over 80 pages of index! It
is extremely rare that a piece of scholarship is also so readable. You are the
right kind of writer to do scholarship; to show them that the material can be
assembled and even analysed…and yet be a page turner.

If I can
conquer this thing in a decent time range, I'd love to try a review. Is there
some place you'd like me to try to get it in — a literary journal, maybe, and
the name of an editor who would think the was a good idea? I'd like to help you
sell it.

So
congratulations on getting yet another major book out of your thickening brain.

John
Herrmann

Novelist

John,

Thanks for your
great letter! Yours is the first response to the book that I’ve received from a
writer, and it means a lot to me to hear what you have to say about its
readability.

Lew

Lew,

Your history makes
me breathless. It doesn't stop for even a coffee break. I don't know what I
could say about it other than it is a complete — over-complete — readable
tracking of a great evil by well meaning people — your relatives, mostly. I can
do a paragraph for Amazon.com, but I am not the reviewer for this. If you've
read any of Blake Bailey's biographies (most recent, Cheever, but the Yates
book is relentlessly complete) I would say that they are fine, but what's to
review? I guess I'm just not able to review anything other than fiction, and
then not all fiction, as I did the first review of Solzhenitsyn's August1914
and could only review the awful language of the translation. I guess because
S's work has always been mostly history. But I will say that your Satan book
does not dramatize, and that's the stuff that I would pick up for reviewing. In
the end, the whole thing moves too fast for me to find a place to begin talking
about it. I will say that I was stunned at many of those really nutty women.

At times your
narration seems to be slightly 17th century. Maybe not "your" prose
but your sources' choices of expressions?

John Herrmann

John,

The dialogue in Satan’s
Scourge is the actual recorded
words of the original characters in it. What I did is go through the
depositions of the witnesses and the trial records, and if someone said that
something happened at a particular time, in a particular place and year, I
simply moved the incident being described back in the chronology to the point where
the witnesses said it happened. Therefore, nearly all characterizations of
people and descriptions of events are taken from the actual dialogues and
monologues of the people involved. That’s why the language in the mouths of the
people speaking it is archaic, because it is, indeed, archaic language.

The only
characterizations of people in the book that I invented are derived from the
horoscopes I cast of the main characters on their birthdays (knowing
beforehand, of course, how things developed in their stories). I hope that does
two things: Gives the reader an opening sense of the adults those characters
would become and portents of the events in which they were eventually involved.

I’m glad you like
the book.

Lew

Beacon, New York

Congratulations, Lew.

I hope it fares well.
I've talked it up to a few folks and passed on the link to your site for
orders. I never wrote a review but I might get to that yet. Trying to keep a
day job gets tough enough some days.

For me, it rekindled a
fascination I had with the competition between magic, science, and religion. I
had always thought that science won, and that was it — reason would reign for
good. But our need or desire for religion and magic are like an addiction, and
we must ever be watchful of that, just as a real addict knows that the bottle
is not the solution, and causes more harm than the immediate pleasure or
feeling of safety it brings.

For what it's worth, it
reminds me of a song written by one of my favorite musicians, Neil Peart, of
the Canadian band called Rush:

was finally published today, May 2nd, 2009. A number of people have ordered copies, which have been mailed, and many others have asked for details; here they are, together with the Foreword and Acknowledgments:

Satan’s
scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England
1580-1697 is a book of history, a chronicle of the period when the Age of
Sympathetic Magic, which had been the system by which mankind operated from
time immemorial, was beginning to shift over to the Age of Science, “The New
Philosophy,” by which the world would be increasingly governed from then forward.
The main focus of the book is upon the Putnam family of Buckinghamshire, in
England, from the birth of John Putnam, born in 1580, some of whose descendants
would be deeply involved in the last gasp of sympathetic magic, the great witchcraft
explosion of Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692, which is the climax of the
book.

The volume
not only looks at all the witchcraft cases in England and New England
during the period covered, but it also tells the stories of the major scientists
and Adepts of sympathetic magic (often the two were the same) in Europe and
America. The effect is twofold: First, the method is strictly chronological,
unfolding like a tapestry year by year. As one thread of the tapestry swells
and tapers off, others appear and interweave with one another. Second, the
history is told from the point of view of common people, the Puritans of
England and New England primarily, but also the crystal gazers, alchemists,
alleged witches and their accusers, and those ordinary citizens caught up in
the webs woven by plotters, liars, “possessed” children and their parents, and,
of course, the clerics.

Furthermore,
this is the period when America was settled, when Oliver Cromwell and the
Roundheads carried out their Puritan revolution, and all the politics and
machinations of the relevant sovereigns and courtiers of the period are also a
part of the tapestry here woven.

One is
probably saying to oneself at this point, “It’s too complicated and confusing.”
But when one begins to read the book one discovers that things start out clear,
and they stay clear throughout. Everything in it is true. All the incidents
took place in the real world, according to my historical sources (which are
exhaustive — A bibliography is appended), and this depiction of the Salem witchcraft
trials is the most complete and accurate that has ever been written, many errors
and misprisions having been corrected.

I wish to
acknowledge those who have helped and inspired me in this project. The first person
to encourage my writing on the subject was Dr. Eleanor Michel of Meriden,
Connecticut, High School for whose 11th grade English class in
1950-51 I wrote an addendum — an extra concluding chapter, a postscript — to The
House of the Seven Gables, in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne [http://www.nightsandweekends.com/articles/09/NW0900132.php].

At about the
same time four of us at Meriden High founded the Fantaseers Science-Fiction
Reading Club which grew to include (Rev.) Ben Barnes, Pierre Bennerup, Bill
Burns, (Prof.) Lindsey Churchill, the late Phineas Gay, (Rev.) George Hangen,
George Lallos, the late Jack Rule, (Rev.) Ray Staszewski, George Veillette,
(Rev.) Arthur von Au, and Paul Wiese — the Black Thirteen who provided me with
Faustian fellowship, evil escapades, vile volumes, and the opprobrious
opportunity to do my second (very imaginative) writing on the subject of the
Salem Village witchcrafts: A Senior Day skit, a photograph of which appears on
page 139 of my book Fantaseers, A Book of Memories, published
in 2005 [also by Star Cloud Press].

Next, I beg the
indulgence of the Research Foundation of State University of New York for
providing me with a Faculty Fellowship during the summer of 1974, under which I
was to write a volume of poetry but, inasmuch as I had begun this book in the
spring, I finished the first draft instead. I did nothing with it thereafter
beyond query a few publishers who seemed not much interested in it because of
its length, so I put it away until the spring of 2006 when I rewrote it as I
typed it into my new MacBook Pro computer.

I wish to
express my deep gratitude to several librarians for their help in my research:
Eleanor S. Adams of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts,
for her early and kind assistance; Dorothy Mozley, Genealogy and Local History
Librarian of the Springfield City Library, Springfield, Massachusetts, for her
help with the Springfield witchcraft cases of 1646 and 1651, and Cecilia
Caneschi, Reference Librarian of the Meriden, Connecticut, Public Library for
her great help with the Benham Wallingford witchcraft cases of 1691, 1692, and
1697.

The
description of the Vale of Aylesbury at the beginning of this book is in fact
very largely that of Eben Putnam, not myself, taken from his Putnam genealogies
(see Bibliography). Inasmuch as he explored the area, and I have not, I thought
it as well to leave his descriptions largely as he wrote them. I thought it
fitting, too, that this scholar of the Putnam family, who spent such enormous
amounts of time and work researching his people, thus making the Putnams one of
the most thoroughly documented families in America, ought to leave his imprint
on these pages in some way other than statistically, for his two genealogies
were published in limited editions (though I have made them available from
University Microfilms International of Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Over the
years I have met or known many people who are descended from the folk depicted
here including my dear friend, the late poet Constance Carrier of New Britain,
Connecticut; Curtis Disbrow, the husband of my sister-in-law Anne Disbrow of
Meriden; my cousin-in-law Gary Getchell of Cedar Grove, Maine; Lindsey
Churchill and the late Jack Rule, both Fantaseers; the Maine artist Margaret
Macy, a descendant of Rebecca Nurse; the Cleveland poet Mary Oliver; the late
novelist John Cheever, who angrily informed me in my living room in Oswego, New
York, that the character Ezekiel Cheever of Salem Village was fictional, having
been invented by Arthur Miller for his play The Crucible — John did
not stop fuminguntil I showed him his forebear’s testimony in the Salem Witchraft
trial records; my correspondent of almost forty years, the great fantasist Ray
Bradbury, and there were two Drs. Mather, father and son (but doctors of
medicine, not divinity — both Roman catholics!) in Oswego where I lived and
taught for thirty-one years at the State University of New York College at
Oswego, and where I wrote the first draft of this volume.

I wish to express my
deepest gratitude to my wife, Jean, who helped me with the chore of working on
the index of this book, the most grueling task she has suffered since the
school year 1968-1969 when she carried most of the physical labor of typing and
editing two manuscripts, The Spiritual Autobiography of Luigi Turco, my father, and The
Literature of New York: A Selective Bibliography of Colonial and Native New
York State Authors.

Lewis Putnam
Turco

Dresden
Mills, Maine

Tuesday,
December 2nd, 2008

REMARKS

Camden, Maine

March 31, 2009

To: Lewis
Turco

Dear Sir:

I have to
admit enjoying your lecture of Sunday, March 29, in double time (military term)
because of its double concentration on witchcraft and Reverend George
Burroughs. Then seeing your volume, Satan's Scourge, on
the front table I realized you may have written the most comprehensive modern
treatment of the epic yet. And I suppose you have.

But prime
purpose of this letter is to say I have begun to read your tome and greatly
thank you for the labors you invested in it.

Sincerely,

Robert Manns

Playwright

Libby, Montana

Putnam Turco
—

I just
received Satan's Scourge, and what an enormous work it is.
I've only had time to flip through it but already love an incident with two
guys, a clay pipe and a horse's ass. 725 pages and over 80 pages of index! It
is extremely rare that a piece of scholarship is also so readable. You are the
right kind of writer to do scholarship; to show them that the material can be
assembled and even analysed…and yet be a page turner.

If I can
conquer this thing in a decent time range, I'd love to try a review. Is there
some place you'd like me to try to get it in — a literary journal, maybe, and
the name of an editor who would think the was a good idea? I'd like to help you
sell it.

So
congratulations on getting yet another major book out of your thickening brain.

John
Herrmann

Novelist

John,

Thanks for your
great letter! Yours is the first response to the book that I’ve received from a
writer, and it means a lot to me to hear what you have to say about its
readability.

Lew

Lew,

Your history makes
me breathless. It doesn't stop for even a coffee break. I don't know what I
could say about it other than it is a complete — over-complete — readable
tracking of a great evil by well meaning people — your relatives, mostly. I can
do a paragraph for Amazon.com, but I am not the reviewer for this. If you've
read any of Blake Bailey's biographies (most recent, Cheever, but the Yates
book is relentlessly complete) I would say that they are fine, but what's to
review? I guess I'm just not able to review anything other than fiction, and
then not all fiction, as I did the first review of Solzhenitsyn's August1914
and could only review the awful language of the translation. I guess because
S's work has always been mostly history. But I will say that your Satan book
does not dramatize, and that's the stuff that I would pick up for reviewing. In
the end, the whole thing moves too fast for me to find a place to begin talking
about it. I will say that I was stunned at many of those really nutty women.

At times your
narration seems to be slightly 17th century. Maybe not "your" prose
but your sources' choices of expressions?

John Herrmann

John,

The dialogue in Satan’s
Scourge is the actual recorded
words of the original characters in it. What I did is go through the
depositions of the witnesses and the trial records, and if someone said that
something happened at a particular time, in a particular place and year, I
simply moved the incident being described back in the chronology to the point where
the witnesses said it happened. Therefore, nearly all characterizations of
people and descriptions of events are taken from the actual dialogues and
monologues of the people involved. That’s why the language in the mouths of the
people speaking it is archaic, because it is, indeed, archaic language.

The only
characterizations of people in the book that I invented are derived from the
horoscopes I cast of the main characters on their birthdays (knowing
beforehand, of course, how things developed in their stories). I hope that does
two things: Gives the reader an opening sense of the adults those characters
would become and portents of the events in which they were eventually involved.

I’m glad you like
the book.

Lew

Beacon, New York

Congratulations, Lew.

I hope it fares well.
I've talked it up to a few folks and passed on the link to your site for
orders. I never wrote a review but I might get to that yet. Trying to keep a
day job gets tough enough some days.

For me, it rekindled a
fascination I had with the competition between magic, science, and religion. I
had always thought that science won, and that was it — reason would reign for
good. But our need or desire for religion and magic are like an addiction, and
we must ever be watchful of that, just as a real addict knows that the bottle
is not the solution, and causes more harm than the immediate pleasure or
feeling of safety it brings.

For what it's worth, it
reminds me of a song written by one of my favorite musicians, Neil Peart, of
the Canadian band called Rush:

The Virginia Quarterly Review"The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).

The Tower JournalTwo short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.

The Tower JournalMemoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.

The Michigan Quarterly ReviewThis is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).

The Gawain PoetAn essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.